


took my love, took it down

by oryx



Category: Kamen Rider Kuuga
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 17:53:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3218153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oryx/pseuds/oryx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three people who meet Godai, sometime in the distant future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	took my love, took it down

**Author's Note:**

> i can't be the only one who thinks "landslide" is the perfect godai song, right? ... no? j-just me? okay.jpg

She doesn’t usually take the Maglev.  
   
She walks, most days, because it’s just about the only exercise she’s getting, now that studying takes up 75 percent of her life. But today, with a stack of musty old books balanced precariously in her arms and a weather forecast calling for rain within the next twenty minutes, she’s left with no other option but to take the train.  
   
Of course some brusque middle-aged man would run into her on the platform, sending her and her books toppling to the ground. Of course he would scowl down at her like it’s her bloody fault and go on his way without so much as an apology. Of course.  
   
 _At least there’s still a few nice people left in London_ , she thinks, as someone kneels down next to her to ask if she’s okay.  
   
“Ah, yeah,” she says. “Thank you.”  
   
The guy smiles warmly, and cliché as it may be, her breath catches in her throat. He’s maybe a few years older than her, with dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail and faint stubble along his jawline. He’s got only one medium-sized backpack – decorated with so many pins and patches she can barely make out its original colour, crammed full to bursting, the sleeve of a shirt hanging out the side. She’s close enough to see the bruise-like circles of tiredness beneath his eyes, and yet his sunny expression doesn’t waver in the slightest as he begins collecting and re-stacking her books.  
   
“Don’t see many people carrying around actual books these days,” he says, turning one of them over in his hands. His English is odd – spoken perfectly, but with an accent that sounds like a conglomeration of several.  
   
“…They’re my mum’s,” she says. “She was always kind of old-fashioned.”  
   
“‘The Ethics of Justice: An Analysis of Law, Morality, and the Self,’” he reads aloud, and whistles appreciatively. “Just some light reading, then?”  
   
She can feel the corner of her mouth twitch.  
   
“She warned me,” she says. “My mum. She told me not to go into law – that it’d take years off my life.” ( _Why am I telling this to a stranger?_ she wonders, but something about this guy feels not-so-strange.) “But I wanted to be like her, you know? I wanted to protect people. And now here I am, stressed out, running on three hours of sleep, lugging her old books back to my flat just in case they might help me pass the bar.” She laughs wearily. “Mistake of my life.”  
   
He is silent for a long moment. When she glances up at him, his eyes are wide and startled, studying her with such intensity that she almost flinches.  
   
“…What is it?” she says. “You alright?”  
   
He blinks, then, and shakes his head, that easy smile falling back into place. “Yeah,” he says. “Just got lost in thought for a second there.” Both of them get to their feet, and his hand brushes against hers as he transfers the stack of books back into her arms. His skin is startlingly warm to the touch – warmer than any person has a right to be, outside in the middle of a London November. “Good luck. On becoming a lawyer, I mean. You seem like you’d be suited for it.”  
   
He grins broadly and gives her a thumbs up, and she can’t help but laugh. Who does a thumbs up anymore? That’s a relic from her parents’ time.  
   
“Thanks,” she says, and returns the gesture. “Good luck to you, too. On whatever it is you’re doing.”  
   
The Maglev behind her beeps in warning of its imminent departure, and she nearly jumps out of her skin, remembering where she is in a sudden rush. She hurries on board with hardly any time to spare, almost getting her hair caught in the doors as they swish shut.  
   
(As the train pulls away she lifts a hand in parting to the man on the platform, watching as his figure grows steadily smaller, and feels as if she’s waving goodbye to something she doesn’t quite understand.)  
   
  
   
  
   
He knows everyone in this town.  
   
He’s lived here all his life, after all. A fixture, his old neighbor calls him, smiling with her crooked teeth. He’s the only one left of his friends, who went away as soon as they could, off to Bangalore or New Chennai, laughing at him for choosing to stay behind.  
   
“There’s nothing here for us,” Manjish had said, on the day he hailed a cab and never came back.  
   
Perhaps that’s why he likes it.  
   
Nothing is a surprise here, and the air is still and calm, and he knows every face, which is why he is taken aback to see someone he doesn’t recognize, as he takes a walk through the plaza one Sunday morning. A young man with a pleasant smile, hair that’s long on one side and shaved close on the other, his clothes faded and outdated even by the standards of this backwards place. Tourists are few and far between here. (But he doesn’t look much like a tourist.)  
   
He’s doing magic tricks for the local children – making coins disappear, “levitating” them in the space between his hands – and Arvind laughs to himself. Of course only the youngest of the children are paying attention. Even in a place like this they have portable holoscreens, 4D video games, phones with facechat and wifi. What interest would kids of this generation have in such simple tricks?  
   
He sees the young man again later that evening, outside the run-down motel near the bus station, leaning tiredly against the sill of the payment window.  
   
“I’m sorry,” says the measured voice of the AI. “Retinal scan shows no results. Those not in the database are not permitted to make purchases within the Lower Asiatic business zone. Please register and try again.”  
   
“Oh, c’mon,” the stranger says in a cajoling tone of voice. “Can’t you let it slide? I have the money to pay for it.”  
   
The machine whirs for several moments.  
   
“I’m sorry. Retinal scan shows no – ”  
   
The stranger sighs deeply and reaches out to press the ‘off’ button, cutting the AI off mid-sentence.  
   
“I’ve never seen anyone try to plead with one of those,” Arvind says.  
   
The stranger turns to look at him and smiles. “Thought it was worth a shot,” he laughs, lifting his hands as if to say ‘what can you do?’ “I’m still not used to these machines… How long has this thing been here? Instead of an actual person, I mean? I don’t remember it from last time.”  
   
Arvind stares at him. “Thirty years, probably,” he says. “Maybe longer.”  
   
“ _Thirty years?_ ” the stranger echoes. He shakes his head in apparent disbelief, and whispers, so quiet that Arvind almost doesn’t hear: “Has it really been that long?”  
   
Arvind almost questions it. The words “you don’t look a day over twenty-five” are right there on his tongue, but for some odd reason he swallows them down. Maybe some things, he thinks, are best left alone.  
   
“If you need a place to stay,” he says instead, “I can offer you my couch for a night or two.”  
   
“Really?” the stranger says, dark eyes brightening, and Arvind wonders just what it is he’s doing. Unregistered individuals are criminals, usually. People who live outside the law. But he’s never seen a face that looked less like a criminal’s than this man’s.  
   
“Yeah,” he says, with only a moment of hesitation. “Follow me.”  
   
He forgets, sometimes, how his house must appear to outsiders. Canvases – some with finished paintings, others half-finished and forgotten – occupying every chair and table, stacked against one another in the corner of every room. The stranger seems intrigued rather than put-off, though. He sets aside his backpack and bends down to examine one of the many paintings that line the hallway.  
   
“So you’re an artist?”  
   
“… Of a sort,” Arvind says. “It was a hobby for most of my life. But I lost my job a few years back, and now it’s… just about all I do, really. As you can see, though,” here he makes a sweeping gesture, “they don’t sell particularly well. Not that I’m too keen on selling them to begin with.”  
   
He wanders into the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea, and watches as the stranger moves into the sitting room to admire the artwork there. He spends a long while staring at one of them – one of his less interesting works, Arvind has always thought, a simple interior setting of a dark-haired man sitting in a window seat, looking out into the distance, his face turned away from the viewer. The stranger moves that painting aside to look at the one behind it, and something seems to change in him, then, his entire body gone tense.  
   
“…Where,” he says, and his voice comes out thin and broken. “Where did you see these symbols?”  
   
He lifts the painting up. (The look on his face is indescribable. Frightened, almost. Haunted by something terrible.)  
   
It’s one of Arvind’s many half-finished works – ideas that never came together fully, or that left him before he could capture them properly. It’s about as simplistic as such paintings can get. Just a row of strange symbols, not of any language he knows to exist in this world, painted in a deep, rust-coloured shade. The background is dark, textured, as if the markings were etched into rock.  
   
“Saw them in a dream, if you’d believe it,” Arvind says. The kettle is whistling, and he takes it off the stove, pouring the water over the tea leaves to steep. “As long as I can remember I’ve had these dreams. They seem… more like memories, in a way. When I was child, painting them was the only thing I could think to do. And the habit stuck, I suppose.”  
   
A few minutes later, when he walks out into the sitting room with cups of tea in hand, the stranger is still standing there, staring at the same paintings.  
   
“Never had anyone take so much interest in my work,” Arvind says with a quiet laugh. “If you’d like, I could show you around my studio as well?”  
   
“Ah,” the stranger says, seeming to come back to himself from someplace else. There’s something desperate about his expression when he turns to look at Arvind. “Yes. Please.”  
   
“The studio” was originally just a garage – a few old gardening tools are still propped up in the corner, things he had no other place for and thus left to gather dust. The overwhelming paint fumes still can’t quite erase the smell of oil and cleaning supplies from before. He lifts the rusted door with some effort and gestures for the stranger to follow him in.  
   
“Most of these are works in progress,” he says, nodding towards the row of easels. “Particularly…” He stops in front of the mural that decorates the back wall, folding his arms and frowning up at it. “Been working on this one for years now. Usually an image doesn’t stick with me long. But this one… this one is different.”  
   
A wintery mountain landscape, the dark shapes of distant trees obscured by white. Two figures lying in the snow, fallen there in perfect symmetry, with splashes of red here and there around them. A straightforward picture, one might think, but no matter how much he works on it, no matter how many details he adds, something about it never feels complete.  
   
When he glances over, the stranger is trembling visibly, his face gone pale.  
   
 “Is – is something wrong?” Arvind asks. “Are you ill?”  
   
The stranger shakes his head.  
   
“…No,” he says, his voice strained. He forces a tight-lipped smile. “I’m fine. I just… Do you mind if I stay here for a few more minutes? To look at everything.”  
   
Arvind blinks at him in confusion. “I… No. No, I don’t mind at all,” he says. “I’ll just… go start dinner, then? Take as long as you like.”  
   
At the kitchen door Arvind pauses and turns back. The stranger is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the studio, staring up at the mural intently, as if he were looking for something in it. As if he were reading something written in the layers of paint, something that Arvind himself cannot see.  
   
The next morning the man is gone, with only a hastily-scribbled note saying “thank you” to prove that he’d been there at all.  
   
  
   
  
   
She’s always hated police line duty.  
   
Of course she wouldn’t dare to complain. Merely _having_ this job is lucky enough, what with the way things are nowadays. Cops just aren’t as necessary as they were in the past. That’s what her father says whenever he bemoans her choice of career. People don’t trust law enforcement the way they used to. Here in South Africa in particular, where the corporations have taken hold of almost every aspect of daily life. She grew up wanting nothing more than to “protect and serve,” just like her heroes in the old movies. But with each passing day she can feel that dream slipping away more and more.  
   
Until it vanishes altogether, she supposes she’ll be here, at the police line, telling gawking spectators to “please stand back” for the fifteenth time. _If this is where it ends_ , she thinks with a tired sigh, _then so be it._  
   
And that is when, out of the corner of her eye, she sees someone duck under the police tape.  
   
“Oi, what do you think you’re doing?” She jogs over to block the person’s path. “This area is dangerous. Do you have clearance to be here?”  
   
The civilian smiles genially and gives her a thumbs up. “It’s fine,” they say. “Don’t worry about it.”  
   
“Don’t – _don’t worry about it_? Listen, buddy, I don’t know who you are, but you certainly don’t look like an emergency rescue official. This building,” and here she gestures behind her, “is on the verge of collapsing, alright? You need to get back.”  
   
“It’s fine,” they say again, reassuring, and though they’re still smiling she can’t help but notice how deeply _weary_ they look. “I can help.”  
   
She stares at them. Her hand, halfway to the scanner on her hip to ID this person, instead falters and drops slowly to her side. For some inexplicable reason their words ring true. It’s fine. They can help.  
   
(As they brush past her, moving with purpose towards the burning building, she doesn’t even try to stop them.)  
   
She sees them again later, once the whole mess is finished and her shift is finally, mercifully over. She walks into her favorite dive bar, eager for a drink after one of the longest days on record, and who would be there but that same dark-haired civilian with the tired eyes.  
   
“Oh, the officer from earlier,” they say. “Not here to arrest me, I hope?”  
   
As her initial surprise fades, she moves to take the seat next to them, and can feel her eyes narrowing as she studies their face.  
   
“Have we… met before?” she asks. “I could swear I’ve seen you somewhere, but I…”  
   
She trails off, unable to find the words, and for a while they say nothing. They simply look at her, thoughtful and searching, the dim light of the bar casting their face half in shadow.  
   
“No, I don’t think so,” they say finally, and this time when they smile it almost hurts to see, as hollow and lonely as it is. “I have a pretty good memory, you know. It’s one of my four thousand skills.  
   
“There’s nobody I’ve met that I don’t remember.”


End file.
